Wishing I was at ALA
I’ve been following the bloggers at ALA and wishing I was there with them. My in-laws live in Chicagoland and the last time I went to ALA was in 2000 when it was in Chicago and I was finishing my MLS. I have great memories. Additionally, there looks to be lots of good session going on. Notes from the presentation on Greenstone, Use Measures for Electronic Resources: Theory and Practice, Implementing a Federated Search Tool, of course Top Tech Trends, and the sampling of things in the ALA Exhibition Hall all caught my eye and were immediately saved in Bloglines. Thank your LITA bloggers and other bloggers (you know who you are) for filling in the gaps for those of us who can’t be there!
The Use Measures preconference is of particular interest to me because I will have an article coming out (hopefully soon) in Library Hi Tech about a project we did at SUNY Cortland to develop methods to count database usage. While I think the COUNTER project is a great step forward, in many ways, vendor generated statistics will never completely meet the needs of libraries. The gist is of the article is that the vendor stats miss critical pieces of information that libraries need to make decisions. In particular information about what pathes users take to reach the library databases and where they are using the databases from. If you want to know more, you’ll have to wait for the article to come out to hear my full opinion.